I got back from a difficult fishing trip to find a package in the mailbox. The postmark confirmed my suspicions.
It was from Rudi and contained his latest rig for halibut and striped bass. For several years, the pair of us had been working on gear that would address the problem of loose weed — filaments of algae that often foul the hook. Rudi had been making refinements to conventional gear, while I focused on fly stuff. Solving the weed problem had become our Fermat’s Last Theorem.
The week before, Rudi had sent me an email saying he’d pretty much cracked it. Needless to say, I was more than a little interested. I am always curious to see what the very best anglers, be they conventional or fly, are doing with gear and techniques, and Rudi is an exceptional angler with both types of gear.
Inside the box I found several Z-Man fluke-style soft plastic lures mounted on large worm hooks and attached to a foot of 20-pound mono. There was a short spiral of lead wire on the hook shank, each end neatly tapered with tying thread. The hook eye and the mono knot were buried and superglued inside the soft plastic lure. Rudi told me that the 15 turns of lead wire ensured the lures ran true and were just barely buoyant in salt water. This allows him to fish the rig a few inches above the carpet of weeds on the bay near his home. To ensure weeds don’t hang up on the hook point, it was barely nicked into the top of the lure, a technique that largemouth bass anglers refer to as “skin hooking.”
The next day, I was standing in the surf with a casting rod and a small baitcasting reel, chucking Rudi’s rig 60 to 80 yards out into an area where sand dollars form a small reef holding pipefish, which the halibut like to eat. As promised, the lure ran over the sand dollars and had no trouble navigating a continuous band of loose kelp in the breakers. In less than 45 minutes, I had landed a 25-inch halibut and was headed home.
Fluke-style soft plastic lures are one of the most popular lures on the market. Largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, crappies, striped bass, and trout will all respond to them. You can fish them on top or down deep, with fast or slow retrieves. The ability to bury the point of the hook a millimeter or less into the plastic makes them perfect for weedy or snag-infested waters. Simply put, you can fish these lures just about anywhere that’s wet.
Rudi’s rig inspired me to make a fly version of this wonderful lure. To be successful, the design would have to incorporate three essential parameters: a soft, flexible body, the ability to be mounted on a worm hook or a regular hook, and a tail that moves seductively. It took a while to get the design sorted out, but like Rudi, I think I’ve cracked it. So far, the design has accounted for a number of halibut, striped bass, and largemouth bass. I am confident it will do well with smallmouth bass and brown trout. I just need to get up to the lake to put it in front of them.
Tying the Fluke Fly is somewhat different from tying regular flies. To start with, you tie them as slip-on-style flies, which I described in the May/June 2020 Gearhead column — the fly is simply slipped onto a bare hook. The fly’s chassis is made from 1-millimeter silicone stretch cord. This stuff is incredibly strong and wonderfully supple, creating a fly that can be easily flexed, but is exceptionally rugged. How rugged? I conducted some durability tests with them on my baitcasting rig. At the end of a long cast, they crashed into the water at more than 68 miles per hour. The flies can take this punishment for hours on end.
The body of the fly is made from one-inch-long polyester fibers, which are almost a perfect match for the soft plastic used in the conventional lure. They can be flexed and squeezed, but always return to their original shape. You can buy poly fibers at a craft store or online, but there’s probably enough to tie several thousand flies in your house. You may even be sitting on some as you read this. Cushions and pillows are often filled with the stuff. Presumably you have an old cushion or pillow that is already leaking fibers or that can be sacrificed. Most cushions use white poly, but you may find some are stuffed with brown or green fibers. These can be good for matching fish such as sculpins or sunfish. The poly fibers need to be covered with a thin plastic film to help maintain the right profile and create a deformable surface that can shield the hook point from bits of weed, twigs, or tree limbs. Fabric paints come in a wide variety of colors and are absolutely perfect for this application. Adhesives such as Aquaseal and E6000 can also be used, but you’ll need to don latex gloves and apply the stuff outside so the solvents can gas off into the atmosphere instead of your lungs.
The tail of the fly can be made from any material that wiggles in the water.
Flashabou moves beautifully and also creates a lot of flash, which can be helpful in cloudy water. Rabbit strips are great for patterns that will be worked slowly and close to the bottom, such as sculpins, crayfish, or dragonfly nymphs. To mimic the action of the tail of the superfluke plastic lure, nothing beats strands of silicone leg material or a couple of tentacles cut from a plastic hoochie squid. I’m sure if you look around, you’ll find all kinds of other materials that’ll do a good job.
These flies can be tied to mimic everything from a two-inch pond smelt to a six-inch surf smelt. That said, the design works best for f lies that are over three inches long.
Tying the Fluke
Tying these flies is pretty easy. Having tied several dozen, I find it quicker and easier just to do it in my hands, but a vise can be helpful with the first few attempts. Whether you use a vise or just your hands, make sure you prep and lay out all the materials before you start. It’s tough to hold the silicone cord and the thread bobbin and then have to mess around with poly fibers or tail materials. The following recipe is for a fly three to four inches long. Simply adjust the amount of poly fibers if you want to tie something smaller or larger.
Step 1. Grab a marble-sized (half inch) blob of poly fibers, firmly pinch the opposite sides, and pull the fibers apart. Repeat this process until you get a flat rectangle of fibers that are somewhat aligned. Set this bundle to one side and repeat with as many pieces of poly as you think you’ll need to complete the fly. I usually assume six bunches per inch of silicone stretch cord, but it doesn’t hurt to add a few more just for insurance. Make the first and last bundle about half the size, so you can create a nice taper on either end of the fly.
Step 2. Cut your tailing materials — Flashabou, rabbit strips, hoochie tentacles, or whatever — to the desired length and set aside.
Step 3. Cut a piece of silicone stretch cord to the length of the desired body plus one inch. That inch will be used to create a loop that, big surprise, overlaps an inch. Pinch the short tag end against the other strand and start winding thread at that location. I prefer 6/0 thread, but I doubt thread size is that important. Make about two dozen close turns near the tag end and then wrap the thread in a more open spiral toward the eye of the loop. When you are about a quarter inch from the end, place a hook into the loop. Use a hook with slightly narrower wire than the one you’ll be using when fishing. This ensures the loop will have a tight fit. Wrap tight turns toward the hook until it no longer slides freely inside the silicone cord eye. Knot or whip finish the thread and place a drop of superglue on the front and back wraps, and when they dry, remove the hook.
Step 4. Wrap your chosen tail material onto the end of the long tag and superglue the thread wraps.
Step 5. Place a drop of fabric paint (or flexible head cement) next to the tail wraps. Carefully fold the first small batch of poly fibers into a bundle and place that on top of the glue. Secure the fibers with a couple of thread wraps cinched around the middle of the bundle so you end up with what looks like a fuzzy bowtie on the cord. Gently fold the side of the bundle that points toward the eye back over the thread wraps and smooth it down, so that that side of the bundle also points rearward and the wraps are hidden. Rotate the cord a quarter turn, place another drop of paint or cement about an eighth of an inch above the bundle, and secure the next fiber bundle. Fold and smooth the fibers as you did with the prior batch. Repeat this process, placing bundles incrementally on each of the four quadrants of the cord until you get close to the silicone eye. Make your final poly tie-in a half-size bundle to ensure a tapered head. Whip finish or knot the thread and secure it with superglue.
Step 6. Trim any errant pieces of poly so you have a basic fish shape.
Step 7. Grab whatever colors of fabric paint you need and have a wet cloth at hand. Squirt some of the lightest-color paint onto your forefinger and apply it to the thumb and finger pads using the universal finger sign for money. Starting at the top of the fly, run your finger and thumb over the body and down to the tail. This should apply a thin layer of paint. Modulate pinch pressure as you go to fine tune the body shape. Repeat this process until you have a sort of exoskeleton mesh of paint and poly fibers. This will ensure the fly maintains its shape while allowing water to enter or exit the body. Clean your fingers with the wet cloth and add additional colors as needed. To make the fly really robust, consider adding a small, thicker patch of paint on the top and bottom of the fly, where the worm hook will enter and exit the pattern. I often make these in a contrasting color, such as red or black, to make it easier to mount the fly quickly.
Mounting the Fly
Just as with the soft plastic lure, there are two ways to mount the Fluke Fly on a hook. The first way is Texas style, a technique used by largemouth bass anglers to mount their plastic lures on a worm hook. Slide the silicone eye over the hook point and run it all the way up to the top of the kinked “chin” located just below the hook eye. Lay the fly next to the hook and use a sharpie marker to identify where the hook bend should enter and exit the body. Once you have the two spots marked, slide the silicone eye down the hook shank to provide some slack and run the point through the two marks. Then slide the silicone eye back up to the top of the kinked section. When everything looks good, give the body a slight upward push so that the hook point forms a small depression in the paint. This will allow you to run the fly through all kinds of weeds and sticks without getting hung up. With the center of hook mass close to the center of the fly, the fly tends to fall through the water in an almost level fashion, which looks a lot like a dying fish.
Alternatively, you can nose-mount the fly by simply sliding it over a regular hook so that it hangs from the bend. The tight silicone eye will keep the fly firmly in place as long as you don’t make hyperaggressive roll casts. This setup gives the fly a jigging action, which can trigger the kill switch with a lot of fish. The heavier the hook, the more aggressive the jigging action.
Unlike conventional flies, the fluke fly is tied onto a piece of silicone stretch cord. A loop eye, which slips over the hook, is formed at one end of the cord using thread and secured with superglue (see the top image to the right). A tail of any material (plastic hoochie tentacles in this example) is tied onto the unlooped end of the cord, and the tie-in point is saturated with superglue (second image). Once the tail is in place, the body is formed by tying a series of small bunches of polyester fibers onto the cord in a manner that will create a symmetrical body (third image). Once the body is formed, simply cut to a fish shape with a pair of sharp scissors (fourth image).
The Gearhead column in the May/June 2020 issue of California Fly Fisher provides additional detail on forming loop eyes with stretch cord, but the instructions presented in step 3 of the tying steps above should suffice.
— Robert Ketley
